Trouble with a FCPX Project

[Ethosik]

So I have been using Final Cut Pro X for years and never had any real issues. This latest project however is becoming a real pain. Background Rendering on a 15 minute video is taking 6 hours. I do instructional videos so this has a lot of titles. Even if I let it run for 6 hours, if I change just one word in one of the titles its another 6 hours.

Has anyone experienced this before? I already tried to delete the rendered files and have it regenerate. I tried to remove everything and add it to a new project. I am not sure why such a simple video - 1080p even is taking so long with the background render step. Also, my entire mac slows to a crawl during this to where I cannot do anything else on the computer. Even the screen saver lags heavily.

I have a maxed out 2019 i9 iMac. I tried with and without an eGPU and there was no difference.

 

[casperes1996]

What codecs are you using?

Something I can recommend; If there are parts of the video that you know won't change any more, at least other than very simply cuts or additive adjustments, bake it in. - Export that region to a new output file and swap out that section of footage with the fully rendered output file instead. This way it's just one layer of video rather than a composition with effects and titles and such

 

[Ethosik]

What codecs are you using?

Something I can recommend; If there are parts of the video that you know won't change any more, at least other than very simply cuts or additive adjustments, bake it in. - Export that region to a new output file and swap out that section of footage with the fully rendered output file instead. This way it's just one layer of video rather than a composition with effects and titles and such

I do have a export from After Effects that is HEVC in my timeline. My Final Cut Pro X project is Prores 422 1080p.

Oh good idea! How would I go about doing that? Would you group them in a Compound Clip then export that?

 

[casperes1996]

I do have a export from After Effects that is HEVC in my timeline. My Final Cut Pro X project is Prores 422 1080p.

Hm. HEVC can be really tough if you don't have a hardware encoder for it. Macs with a T2 chip have that hardware encode; The iMac line currently doesn't have T2 chips, and I am not sure if the GPU in the iMac can encode HEVC; By the sound of things it can't. 5 minutes of HEVC on my MacBook Pro (15" 2014 base) with absolutely no effects or anything, just cuts, from 2 1080p clips, can take upwards or 15 minutes, so yeah might be that.

Oh good idea! How would I go about doing that? Would you group them in a Compound Clip then export that?

That would certainly work, yeah. Whatever feels the fastest to you. Compound clip and export would work. What I usually do is just mark the whole section I want, hit cmd+c to copy, cmd+n to start a new timeline, cmd+v to paste it in, and then F19 which is my "export to ProRes Master file" shortcut

 

[Ethosik]

Hm. HEVC can be really tough if you don't have a hardware encoder for it. Macs with a T2 chip have that hardware encode; The iMac line currently doesn't have T2 chips, and I am not sure if the GPU in the iMac can encode HEVC; By the sound of things it can't. 5 minutes of HEVC on my MacBook Pro (15" 2014 base) with absolutely no effects or anything, just cuts, from 2 1080p clips, can take upwards or 15 minutes, so yeah might be that.



That would certainly work, yeah. Whatever feels the fastest to you. Compound clip and export would work. What I usually do is just mark the whole section I want, hit cmd+c to copy, cmd+n to start a new timeline, cmd+v to paste it in, and then F19 which is my "export to ProRes Master file" shortcut

I believe the i9-9900k has HEVC encoding/decoding in the processor itself? So for the future, as replacing the HEVC file will be a headache for this project, what would you export from After Effects to not cause an issue in Final Cut Pro X?

 

[casperes1996]

I believe the i9-9900k has HEVC encoding/decoding in the processor itself? So for the future, as replacing the HEVC file will be a headache for this project, what would you export from After Effects to not cause an issue in Final Cut Pro X?

Hm. it might; I honestly don't know. You're probably right, Intel usually does keep fairly up to date with their QuickSync engine. I guess question is whether Apple's utilising it or just expecting T2? IDK.

I've never done much with Adobe's video editing tools. If you can export directly to ProRes that would probably be the best for editing but with quite a large file. Otherwise, regular h.264 is always a good option. HEVC might also be fine if there is hardware acceleration for it in your machine; Guess the issue with this timeline could be something else - Or maybe an update to Final Cut will one day enable hardware acceleration on your machine 🤷‍♂️

 

[Ethosik]

Hm. it might; I honestly don't know. You're probably right, Intel usually does keep fairly up to date with their QuickSync engine. I guess question is whether Apple's utilising it or just expecting T2? IDK.

I've never done much with Adobe's video editing tools. If you can export directly to ProRes that would probably be the best for editing but with quite a large file. Otherwise, regular h.264 is always a good option. HEVC might also be fine if there is hardware acceleration for it in your machine; Guess the issue with this timeline could be something else - Or maybe an update to Final Cut will one day enable hardware acceleration on your machine 🤷‍♂️

Hmm I think something was just odd with my project for some reason. I was in the process of grouping sections into their own compound clips and that process alone made my Background Render take 5 minutes. I have not exported to files yet, but the act of Compound Clips alone made it night and day difference. Are Compound Clips more optimized that way? I do not use them that often, maybe I should?

 

[casperes1996]

Hmm I think something was just odd with my project for some reason. I was in the process of grouping sections into their own compound clips and that process alone made my Background Render take 5 minutes. I have not exported to files yet, but the act of Compound Clips alone made it night and day difference. Are Compound Clips more optimized that way? I do not use them that often, maybe I should?

Hm. Seems weird. As far as I know, and at least in older versions of Final Cut, compound clips were purely for organisational purposes, and had 0 impact on the way anything was rendered

 

[Ethosik]

Hm. Seems weird. As far as I know, and at least in older versions of Final Cut, compound clips were purely for organisational purposes, and had 0 impact on the way anything was rendered

I think there is more to this story, and I think I have some evidence for myself that I need to make compound clips more often. When I modified my title at the end of my video, it would need to background render the entire timeline again for 6 hours (which is odd). However, now that my ending portion of the video (referred to a closing section), if I change one word in a title it takes now 10 seconds to background render, instead of the 6 hours it took before.

 

[casperes1996]

I think there is more to this story, and I think I have some evidence for myself that I need to make compound clips more often. When I modified my title at the end of my video, it would need to background render the entire timeline again for 6 hours (which is odd). However, now that my ending portion of the video (referred to a closing section), if I change one word in a title it takes now 10 seconds to background render, instead of the 6 hours it took before.

Interesting. I think either there's a bug in rendering without compound clips then or they''ve dramatically changed how compound clips work